Ingrid Lederhaas-Okun, vice-president of product placement and design at
Tiffany & Co, sentenced to a year in prison for stealing and re-selling
165 items of jewellery

She was the highly-paid vice-president of product placement and design at Tiffany & Co. But the luxury good store was stunned to discover that for years Ingrid Lederhaas-Okun had been conducting a sideline in her own product placement.

Ingrid Lederhaas-Okun, 46, has now been sentenced to a year in prison for stealing and re-selling 165 items of jewellery worth $2.1 million.

Security is famously tight for the showcases of glittering diamond, platinum and gold jewellery at the store on Manhattan’s 5th Avenue, immortalised in films such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

But after Lederhaas-Okun was laid off from her $360,000-a-year (£220,000) position during a redundancy programme, the company discovered that she had used her inside position to remove diamond-encrusted platinum bracelets, earrings, rings and pendants.

She managed to hide the thefts at the company where she worked for 22 years through an inventory paperwork write-off.

Paul Gardephe, US District Judge, imposed the sentence, rejecting a plea for leniency from the defence who said she had already paid dearly for her crime.

Lederhaas-Okun’s husband has filed for divorce and their $4.4 million home must be sold to pay for her fines.

"Ingrid has lost everything: her husband, her job, her prospects for a job, her home, and faces a largely empty future,” said attorney David Patton, arguing for a six-month sentence.

He attributed the thefts to “psychological imbalance” related to difficulties in her marriage and her career. “Ingrid did not need the money,” he said. “For reasons that can only be explained by a psychiatric illness, Ingrid took huge risks with her life and her freedom each time she stole. The risks did not pay off.”

The judge was not impressed by the argument, however, saying that it was impossible to know why Lederhaas-Okun pursued a path of “self-destruction which could only have one outcome — disaster”.

No noted the timespan of the thefts, the fact that she tried to resell some of the jewellery and her comfortable financial set-up: she and her husband had an annual joint income of $700,000 - $900,000.

"This was not a crime of impulse,” he said. “The defendant made many bad decisions over many years.”

He also ordered Lederhaas-Okun to forfeit more than $2.11 million to the government and pay $2.24 million in restitution to Tiffany. The monies will be recovered from the sale of a home that she and her now-estranged husband, Robert Okun, had shared in the affluent Connecticut community of Darien. The house is listed for sale at $4.4 million.

Lederhaas-Okun offered a tearful courtroom apology. “I can’t express my remorse enough,” she said. She pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to thefts that began in 2005.